Obama supporters in Vancouver overjoyed as president re-elected (with video)

VANCOUVER - Tension turned to outright jubilation as several hundred Barack Obama supporters — American and Canadian — cheered at a downtown Vancouver pub Tuesday evening as their candidate’s reelection was announced earlier than many expected.

“I feel great, we got another four years to go, we’re going to get some stuff done,” said Heyward Watson, 61, a BC Housing employee who moved to Vancouver from Seattle in January. ”We’re going to make sure that Obamacare stays intact, we’re going to create some jobs.”

“I’m surprised how early it came, I thought it was going to be later,” Watson said at 8:13 p.m. announcement that Obama was projected to win what pundits earlier this week had called a horse race that would go down to the wire.

Just an hour and a half earlier Watson said, “If (Mitt) Romney wins, we’re going to suffer through four years of disastrous times, so I have to learn how to live with that. I’m worried about all my relatives and friends.”

Racism had driven much of the Republican attacks against Obama, Watson said. “Every success he’s had, they try to find a way to say it’s not successful.”

As the crowd at Ceili’s Irish Pub cheered Obama’s victory in Wisconsin, Watson’s wife Joanne Burt remarked on the vitriol American voters spew at their opponents.

“Politics in America is very divisive,” said Burt, 50, who has dual Canadian-American citizenship and has voted as an American in Canada and vice versa. “People are extremely divided in how they think and what they want.”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re Republican or Democrat, they want their way, they want their person to win and to have everything,” Burt said. “And they get really ugly when they don’t win.”

She said numerous friends in Seattle joked with her Tuesday that a Romney victory would send them up north to crash on her couch.

Across the room, Atlanta, Ga. native Lindsey Peacock shared a long table with husband Hassan Arshad and their friends.

Peacock, a web editor, said she doesn’t talk about the election with her right-leaning parents. “It’s basically one of those conversations that you just don’t have.

“You don’t talk about politics at home because otherwise there’s going to be a shouting match.”

Peacock mailed in a vote for Obama in the historically Republican state of Georgia.

“It all counts toward the popular vote,” she said as her friends cheered loudly and clinked beer glasses all around her. “Even though I’m voting in a very Republican-leaning state, I’m doing my duty and I’m setting an example for others.”

She said the U.S. is still facing economic hardship. “I’m insulated from the economic hardship, but I do go home two or three times a year and I see the poverty.”

Democrats Abroad planned 13 other similar events across Canada, while a website for Republicans Abroad Canada had only one election night party listed online, in Toronto.

Democrats Abroad Canada’s secretary of membership David Katz was ecstatic with election result.

“The people have spoken and I believe Obama has been given a very strong mandate for the next four years,” he said. “It’s not a matter of progressive or conservative or ideology.

“Right now America is facing some very large challenges… more than anything the politicians need to come together and really follow the leadership of the president to resolve the crises the country is facing.”

Katz was born in Vancouver but obtained his American citizenship from his father, a Vietnam veteran who settled in Canada after that war.

Back in 2008 when Obama was first elected Katz, then a 24-year-old UBC physics graduate student, told The Sun he was proud of the role his younger generation took in electing the first mixed-race president.

“My parents’ generation have really been running things since the Reagan revolution. And now my generation is asserting itself and saying this is our country too and the repercussions of this election are going to affect us far more than they will you."

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Obama supporters in Vancouver overjoyed as president re-elected (with video)

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